Abstract

One striking feature of any anti-oppression movement is the range of people who understand themselves as acting jointly within them. In feminist action, for instance, people are situated differently along lines of race, class, sexuality, immigration and citizenship status, physical and mental ability, and, of course, gender. Such differences descriptively and normatively impact what it means for an agent to engage in joint actions. In order to understand how agents act together, we must first understand how agents share intentions. However, standard accounts of shared intention begin from an agent-neutral stance, wherein agents have no substantive identity or social location. This methodology fails to consider the social situation of agents, unjustified power relations between agents, and the impact that such inequalities have one’s agency. Broadly conceived, my project calls into doubt any account of shared intention that presupposes the agent-neutral methodology of ideal theory. The idealizing conditions required by such a methodology result in accounts of shared intention for which there are, at best, few actual instances. If our goal is to understand how real people share intentions in the actual world, then this methodology prevents us from doing so.